FRENCH police have arrested several suspects over the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine massacre in Paris, which killed 12 people to ‘avenge an insult to the prophet’. The whole country has begun a day of official mourning for what Francois Hollande called ‘an act of exceptional barbarism’, with hundreds of thousands demonstrating in support of press freedom.
The French police are raiding homes in towns and cities throughout France, while the chief gainer from the massacre will undoubtedly be the neo-fascist National Front.
However, it is not correct to try to explain the massacre, and the rise of Islamism, and the enormous heightening of tensions that is being created as an example of reactionary Islamism seeking to crush French and western liberties.
It is a fact that there was no Al-Qaeda in Iraq, over half of which is now under IS rule, before the 2003 Anglo-US invasion. This invasion smashed the country and overthrew Saddam Hussein and his secular, non-Islamic state. It also created the conditions where Al-Qaeda and then the IS could flourish. An Arab nationalist regime that promoted secularism and opposed Al-Qaeda was smashed by the imperialists.
Similarly, in 2011 NATO organised an uprising against the anti-Al-Qaeda, secular Gadaffi regime in Libya. French planes bombed Tripoli and helped place extreme Islamists into power. In fact, IS is now running part of the oil-rich country, thanks to NATO, including France and the imperialist powers. Again, the imperialists have shown that they favour the Islamists over the Arab nationalists!
It is also a fact that the reason so many British, French, Belgian, Dutch and German Muslim youth are fighting in northern Syria is not just that Turkey is allowing them to enter Syria, it is because the Libyan operation was seen as a dress rehearsal for dealing with Assad in Syria, and getting rid of another secular Arab regime and replacing it with Islamists.
It remains a fact that the main enemy in Syria as far as the UK, the US and the French government are concerned is not Islamism but the secular non-Islamic regime of President Assad.
In fact, France and UK have excellent relations with the Islamist regimes in the Gulf, with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who are known to have been financing movements such as IS to increase their influence in Iraq, Syria and Libya.
It is also true that as far as the UK and France’s main ally in the Middle East, Israel, is concerned, IS is definitely not the main enemy – it is the Palestinian masses and the Assad regime in Syria, and Iran!
The imperialist powers in fact have raised up the forces that they now say threaten their inner cities with guns and bombs.
Another issue is the ease with which the Islamists have been able to win bright, middle class university youth in the UK and France into their ranks and into battle, first of all in Syria and then in Paris and London!
In fact, it is the policies of the imperialist powers, ever since the Balfour Declaration, to grab the Middle East and its oil, and the way that millions of Arabs have been killed for this aim has driven some Muslim youth into the arms of the Islamists and their Caliphate.
The workers movement in Europe and America must win the support of all Muslim youth through being in the front line of the struggle to establish the Palestinian state and to smash the imperialist domination of the Middle East.
This will create a revolutionary unity between the working people of the world and the Arab and Muslim masses, to smash capitalism and imperialism worldwide, including the establishment of the state of Palestine as part of a Middle Eastern Federation of Socialist States.
This is the way to defeat those who want to turn Muslim youth into terrorists, whether it is the imperialist powers with their plans to smash Syria and Iran, or IS and Al-Qaeda who have begun killings in the streets to create the widest possible split between EU workers and the Muslim people.
